"Almost every matter of the moment boils down to the same story: The Left’s urge to narrow the bounds of public discourse and insist that ‘conventional wisdom’ unknown to the world the day before yesterday is now as unquestionable as the laws of physics" – Mark Steyn

Obama’s fourth dimension

America has a show culture, and in America, politics is the show of shows. But shows are always a virtual reality, a simulation of real things, that reduced to their essence are shadows of what is real. They are two dimensional. So, despite the real living and dying that Americans do, the representations, the feedback they get on American life from the vastness of American media, is two dimensional.

That is not to say that there is little feeling or emotional content aboard those two dimensions. In fact, feeling and emotion are the principal material of these othewise often flat narratives, supplying the one element that keeps them afloat.

So Americans are plugged in, listening, watching, experiencing every human emotion that can be put into a live wire, and they often buy and sell along those pathways, as well as buying others and selling themselves in those two dimensions, with great feeling.

A problem arises, among many problems, when the political realm is sold in the same way a song, a car, or a soft drink is sold. Images of granny and baby, sorrow and happiness, success and failure, are attached to politics, but when we buy any political product the price is now more often the last of our own freedom, and that freedom is converted by the political class into power. The joke is on us because the power is over us. What was two-dimensional in its offering, like everything else that settles into reality, becomes three dimensions, and the third dimension of politics is power.

This is where conservatives and libertarians, who do not agree that often or on that much , operate: In a third dimension in opposition to the further accumulation of power by the state. Neither conservatives nor libertarians are very proficient in the two dimensional realm. They can occasionally sell themselves and their ideas that way, but the product is freedom and self-reliance, and that’s not really a product at all. That’s a “take back the real world from the illusion of free stuff, because the ultimate price on free stuff is slavery” principle, and principles are three dimensional, at least when they are acted on.

“But we like our free stuff!” is the bottom line in much of America. “Take somebody else’s free stuff, we like ours.” It’s not uniquely American, but in America it’s done in a unique way, and our foolishness in the matter is something we easily deny. The two-dimensional world is very easy to produce: images, themes, music, words, feelings, emotions. Not much reality.

But conservatives and libertarians work the third dimension where they are trying to sell you on yourself and all that messy freedom stuff, where you choose the things you want and your way of life. It’s an uphill battle, and the other side always has a new fear to exploit along with a new product to take care of it (and there’s always granny and baby), and they have long had enough media power accumulated to dominate the discussion. How they have so much control of the media might be explained in terms of simple compatibility: they are specialists in the two dimensional and the media is their natural realm. It’s a ready made and nearly perfect combo.

It is only when reality comes a calling that conservatives and libertarians have a small advantage. They know, for instance, that the business and commerce of entrepreneurial capitalism is the goose that lays the golden eggs in America and that the other side thinks the goose is to be plundered “for the people” and of course and especially “for the children.” When reality comes a calling, however, enough people usually wake up to pry the fingers of plunder from the goose’s neck long enough to let her produce more golden eggs so that the real world can move forward and prosper.

That’s what should be happening now in America, where the goose is hanging by the neck from a tree, and the two dimensional plane of feeling and emotion are as exhausted as the employees of a brothel are on a Sunday morning.

Enter Obama, one of the great operators in the two dimensional realm. He entered the power picture as hope and change, but wore it out in six months. He hid, for awhile, in plain sight, but has now repainted himself as “vitally serious statesman and leader.” He does this in the middle of an act that has been catastrophic for America. The media enables him. Nothing in the third dimension, in reality, supports him in this refurbished act. How does he manage it?

He manages it by not taking either the two or three dimensions seriously, meaning that he believes in neither the shadow nor the reality. He attends to both via the two dimensional route, but he has another realm that he works from, a fourth dimension, and the perspective from there allows him to treat the values and principles of reality with contempt. He is not just working the two dimensional track with the usual images, feelings, and emotions. He has activated the fourth dimension, and that fourth dimension is an idea and the idea is class struggle.

Obama is an orthodox Marxist who has vicious contempt for the values and principles of the bourgeois world, and he embraces revolutionary Marxism, seeking to lift the veil of bourgeois ideology and to allow the “scientific” struggle to emerge. So he has the people who vote for a living on his side and aligned against the people who work for a living. He has a special government class of public employees aligned, much like an army, against the taxpayers who pay them. He has the public sector aligned against the private sector (the goose). And internationally he has reinvigorated radicals in and from the Middle East as scavengers of the bourgeois carcass in Europe.

As the best trained and most committed Marxist since Lenin, living behind a veil of deceit and political correctness, and with violent malice toward bourgeois society, particularly American society, Obama is determined to ruin America and the West. Not only does he have no interest in their success; he has no interest in their survival.

This is the power of his fourth dimension. He is on the other side of the looking glass of history, but he reaches back and manipulates the “false consciousness” of the second and third dimensions, both the illusion and the reality. The illusion is manipulated by the usual methods of image, feeling, and emotion. The reality is manipulated by power. But the drive to do this is concocted in the more or less infantile realm of orthodox Marxism, which is an ideology that teaches that history is an unfolding material process that leads only to the “scientific” finale of socialism. Everything not aligned with this process is either the “false consciousness” of “bourgeois principles,” or a temporary stall along the path.

The collapse of the Soviet Union twenty years ago was an unbearable catastrophe for orthodox Marxists, and was conceivably the most agonizing moment for Obama, who was thirty when it happened. But to a truly committed Marxist, whose understanding of “scientific socialism” takes the form of an absolute belief that interprets all human society in those “scientific” terms, could only see the end of the Soviet experiment as a temporary setback. Indeed, the Soviets left a legacy throughout Europe and America with a ceaseless “march through the institutions” of those societies by indigenous Leftists who were de facto, and sometimes de jure, Soviet agents. It is Marxism that has prevailed in the politics and culture of universities, for instance.

Obama is the legacy of all that and, the extent to which that shows, it had to be hidden in plain sight. Enter political correctness and the countless declarations that focusing on these elements of Obama’s background amounts to “racism.” At this blog, I have said that the church was the key to this man’s unfitness to be a U.S. senator, let alone president. Anyone who belonged to the white parallel of Obama’s church would have been hooted off the national stage the moment he set foot on it. This, however, is the power of political correctness at the two dimensional level. But it is important to understand that political correctness is a tactic from the fourth dimension: A Marxist manipulation, shaped as social intimidation and threat, of bourgeois “false consciousness.”